Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and tea is drunk, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to suppress independence of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and return to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
